The America That Ruth Built

By Richard Ben Cramer

Mark McGwire and Ken Griffey Jr.--are they ready to hit? I don't mean ready to meet the fastball with the fat of the bat. We know they can do that. I mean, are they ready to hit and land their feet as American icons? Can they live forever in the records of the game--and survive this year? Can they bulldoze into the Hall of Fame and worm their way into our hearts? What price will they pay for their place in our small pantheon of power heroes?

We marginalized and embittered Hank Aaron--put him in statistics books, used him for a million video clips, but still can't quite forgive his breaking Babe Ruth's record for career home runs. Roger Maris? We killed him. First we made him bald and drove him out of New York, then out of baseball. And soon he was gone. They called it cancer, but we know it was the asterisk.

Griffey and McGwire are moving up to a brutal league. If they are too much jostled, pressed or in pain, they will surely fall short of glory. But if they're seen to care too much for themselves...well, Ty Cobb is in the Hall but not in our hearts. There are no selfish American heroes.

McGwire and Griffey will be asked about hitting until the subject is like chalk in their mouth; each will be asked about his childhood and diet, race relations and Monica Lewinsky. To hit 62, each man will have to want it so much that he can wall it all away. Yet if he seems to wall us out, we'll fix him with a mortal disdain that will outlast any record he can set. Even so, Griffey and McGwire could make it to the record and beyond, to that Elysian realm where a man seems to stand for something good about the nation and the age. They could achieve that titanic Ruthian grace because of who they are, and who we are, right now.

We Americans love power. It's about how we see ourselves. It's how we're good when we're very good--with overwhelming force. Our great cars aren't about engineering elegance. No, we start with a 490-cu.-in. V-8. In combat, from the Civil War to Desert Storm, we bring to bear massive, ineluctable power. If that approach can't be done (Vietnam comes to mind), that's not a good American war.

That was the glad nerve Ruth palpated. When he showed up with his superfluity of power, the apparently effortless capacity to render moot all the niggling fine points of the contest, the game was instantly changed. The bunt, the stolen base, the Baltimore chop were back-burnered for decades. Ruth's brash Yankees went to the 1923 World Series against the New York Giants, the classiest tacticians of their day. The series went to six games, but the Babe poled three into the right-field seats, and the Yankee dynasty had begun. Heywood Broun spoke for millions of delighted fans when he crowed, "The Ruth is mighty, and shall prevail."

Ruth found a match between his enormous appetites and the national agenda. America had made the world safe for democracy. We were rich. We were strong. In the '20s we were ready to play, with truly American force. While the market soared, we knew God loved America and sent us the Babe to prove it.

Maybe that explains why none of the great sluggers since has been able to attain the titanic grace--unalloyed by sadness and while he still had time to enjoy it. At the bottom of the Depression, Lou Gehrig got there, but had to be wheeled in on his deathbed. Ted Williams, Depression slugger and war hero, wasn't fully enrolled until he retired. Joe DiMaggio made it into our hearts only at the grave of his beloved Marilyn. Mays: another retirement entry. Mantle: another deathbed.

More numerous are the power men who shone in unjoyful ages and in the half-light of provincial parks. Hack Wilson hit 58, but in 1930 Chicago wasn't ready to party. Ralph Kiner flattened balls, but did so in Pittsburgh, which is the Big City only if you're in Cincinnati...where Frank Robinson was huge, before he went to (equally frowzy) Baltimore. You get the idea: it's an uncommon man at an odd moment who can play in the league we're speaking of.

Which is why these guys just might hit. The stars may be lining up just right. McGwire brings to the task a bulky precision that is riveting. He hits moon shots. Griffey has a more modern cool of the stylish synchromesh variety that Michael Jordan brought to hoops. It's about Griffey's joyful acceptance of his personal power.

Maybe America is ready to love these sluggers as it loved the Babe. Now, as then, we are strong; we are rich. But even if there are harder decades ahead, maybe we'll look back on this as one of those moments when we were good--good enough to have American heroes, power heroes. We'll tell our children's children, "I saw it with my own eyes when he smashed that ball outta the park, into the street!" That was when God loved America and its game--and sent Big Mac and Junior to prove it.

Cramer, a Pulitzer prizewinner, is writing a book on DiMaggio.